TinyLetter

» see tinyletter.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

the first time i heard of tinyletter was years late, through english-language writer friends who used it as a private newsletter for ten people. it was an anglophone-writer thing, the kind of internet that exists on twitter and not on turkish forums. the funny part is i did know philip kaplan from fuckedcompany.com in the early 2000s, because every engineer who was online during the dotcom crash knew fuckedcompany. tinyletter was his other thing, much later and much smaller.

he launched it on november 12 2010 with a techcrunch post. the pitch was a one-screen newsletter tool: no campaigns and no segmentation. you typed text and hit send, and the email went to your list. by august 2011 it was hosting around 30,000 newsletters and sending about a million emails a month, which was enough to get mailchimp to buy it.

mailchimp then did the strange thing of leaving it alone. for thirteen years tinyletter sat on the side of the mailchimp product as a free and barely-updated app, popular with people who specifically did not want to be inside a marketing funnel. that lasted until intuit bought mailchimp in 2021 and started rationalizing the portfolio. in november 2023 intuit announced tinyletter would shut down on february 29 2024. accounts could export sent letters and subscriber lists until that date. after that, the archive was gone.

~ the chronicle ~

~ what it was ~

tinyletter let you do one thing: send a text email to a list of people who had signed up. there was no a/b test page and no welcome-flow editor. you wrote, you sent. for a certain class of writer in the 2010s (essayists, poets, food writers, comics critics) that was exactly the right surface area, and the whole point was that you did not feel like a marketer when you opened it.

~ the funny part ~

philip kaplan ran fuckedcompany in the early 2000s before he made tinyletter, and his next thing after was distrokid, the music-distribution service still alive in 2026. there's a running joke that pud's whole career has been low-overhead lowercase brand names that monetize at very different rates. tinyletter was the one with the smallest revenue per user and the longest goodwill tail.

~ what it became ~

the substack migration. by 2024 substack had taken over the same surface area tinyletter had: anybody who wanted to send writing to a list of email subscribers. the difference was that substack had monetization built in (paid subscriptions plus a recommendation engine on top of comments) and tinyletter had nothing. mailchimp killed it because there was no business reason to keep a free product alive when the paying version was right next to it. beehiiv and ghost picked up some of the indie-writer tail substack did not catch.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »